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When Tamir Sapir, a wealthy Soviet immigrant, bought the aging 32-story office building at 2 Broadway in 1995, the real-estate community laughed at him for falling for a white elephant.
"At a minimum, they giggled," says Frederick Contini, Mr. Sapir's associate and the top executive at his Manhattan-based ZAR Realty Management Corp.
No one's laughing anymore. With space for large tenants in scarce supply throughout Manhattan, the vacant building's 1.4 million square feet are a prime commodity. Prospective tenants like the Metropolitan Transit Authority and Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield have given it a serious look, and Mr. Contini figures on signing an anchor tenant of some half-million square feet by Thanksgiving.
Call it luck, or good fortune, ZAR's foray into the cutthroat New York real estate business was well-timed. Starting in May 1992, with the market depressed, it gobbled up 10 office buildings (two have since been sold), and catapulted itself into the big leagues of real estate owners. With values rising, ZAR's portfolio is conservatively worth $400 million.
"They got in at the bottom, and assembled a strong portfolio," says Cushman & Wakefield Inc.'s Darcy Stacom, who brokered a number of the deals.
Now that ZAR is a player, it needs the savvy to run its real estate empire. And though the market is in its favor now, this will be no small task for a group without a history of operating experience. Its holdings are a hodgepodge of 4 million square feet of New York real estate,...